Title: I'm Only Going One Way
Fandom: due South
Rating: PG
Length: 600 words
Content notes: Ray Kowalski, Benton Fraser, and a lot of angst. No happy ending.
Author notes: Everyone gets to do a post-CotW story, right?
Summary: Even if you're sledding off into the sunset with someone, doesn't mean it's happily ever after.


If there’s one thing that Ray should have learned from the trajectory his life has taken so far, it’s that there are no happy endings. Life doesn’t stop just because you get a job, or you get married, or even because your partner is nuts enough to take you seriously when you tell him you want to go look for the hand of Franklin with him.

He’s standing on top of a mountain, on a goddamn wooden dogsled, with Fraser and Dief. Frobisher’s geared them up, and it’s looking for all the world like they’ll be sledding off
into the sunset and then happily ever after.

Only, it’s not an ending, and it’s not happy either. It’s delaying the inevitable. Doesn’t matter there’s a thousand precautions to even make sure he gets out the other end alive and in one piece, this is vacation. Sooner or later, this quest is going to end and he’ll have to go back.

He’s been thinking about Chicago, about Vecchio, even about goddamn Stella, pretty much since the moment they got here. Should have taken that transfer. Should not have taken the Vecchio gig. Shouldn’t have become a cop in the first place.

There’s only so far you can retrace your steps though, and anyway that retracing lark didn’t work so well last time around either. So he keeps moving forward because that’s the only way he knows, even though he doesn’t know what direction he’s facing.

***

They don’t talk a whole lot. During the day Ray’s too busy just staying alive, and Fraser does whatever it is to maximise their chances of survival, triangulating their location with contraptions that might as well be fishing wire and sticks to Ray, for all the use he could make of them if Fraser wasn’t around. By the time night comes around and they make camp somewhere, he usually falls asleep straight after dinner because he’s too wiped out. It gets a little better as the days grow into weeks and his body starts adapting, but if there’s anything that’s becoming clear is that Fraser belongs here and Ray doesn’t, that there is something about Fraser and Canada that surpasses two years of being partners and friends.

He’d better start picking up some orientation skills of his own, because if he doesn’t then he’ll be well and truly lost when he gets back to America.

***

They make it back to civilisation, or anyway to what passes for it in Northern Canada. To proper showers and real beds, and, inevitably, to a plane ticket and an airport.

Fraser’s wearing his brown uniform and Ray wants to kick him in the head just for that. For being all formal and Mountielike and not at all like a person who’s just completed a mental and spiritual quest. Then again, Fraser knows his way around a compass, and it was never his
quest to begin with.

“Goodbye, Ray,” Fraser says, and for a split second Ray doesn’t even know whether he wants to punch him in the face or give him a hug.

The hug wins, of course.

“Pleasure touring Canada with you,” he says, and probably something about not being a stranger.

He turns around, grabs his carry-on bag, and only looks forward until he’s all the way through security and out into the departure lounge.

He gets a coffee, flops down on a chair and stares out of the window at the planes taking off, waiting for his flight to be called.

At least, he thinks, I know I don't want to be facing north for a while. Other than that, any direction is fine, just as long as it's forward.